John C. McDowell

In the work of Teilhard de Chardin, eschatology was adapted to incorporate the insights of evolutionary theory. Humanity, as part of an teleologically evolving cosmos, is progressing from its alpha to its eschatological 'point Omega', its unification or 'Christification', in Jesus Christ. Through the complex discourse on the stages of cosmosphere, biosphere, noosphere and christosphere, Teilhard expressed the belief that, contra Sartre, life is not an absurdity, and human existence, contra Heidegger, is not suspended over nothingness.

Hick's eschatology, or rather 'pareschatology', develops a long similar 'progressivist' lines. However, the differences are significant. Hick's eschatology loses the christological dimension developed by Teilhard, and therefore has more affinity with earlier Liberal thinking in this regard (Hick's Jesus could converse naturally with the 'Jesus of history' of the Ritschlian school). Furthermore, Hick empties eschatology of the historical sphere - or at least the historical sphere of this world - for the kingdom, or rather the human fulfilment, will not be realised in this life. Hick returns, therefore, to a more individualistic interpretation of (par)eschatology. [Interestingly, Hick later criticises the tendency to place humanity in the 'centre' of such an immeasurably vast the universe].

- This Life's Tragic Possibilities

Hick follows what he calls an 'Irenaean' approach, a type of thought which derives from some of Irenaeus' thinking and is encapsulated in that of Schleiermacher. According to Hick, Irenaeus distinguished between what he called the 'image of God' and 'likeness of God'. This is borne by a two-stage conception of the divine creation of humanity.

Hick builds on this conception by claiming, in accordance with the best of nineteenth century evolutionism, that it took many hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution to produce humanity as the imago dei (humanity's nature as rational, personal, moral and religious). This understands "the creation of humankind through the evolutionary process as an immature creature living in a challenging and therefore person-making world." "Thus existence 'in the image of God' was a potentiality for knowledge of and relationship with one's Maker rather than such knowledge and relationship as a fully realized state."

Hick speaks of the creation as entailing an "epistemic distance" from God. This is a conceptual means of preserving "their existence within and as part of a world which functions as an autonomous system and from within which God is not overwhelmingly evident." It is a world, in Bonhoeffer's phrase, etsi deus non daretur, as if there were no God. Or rather, it is religiously ambiguous, capable both of being seen as a purely natural phenomenon and of being seen as God's creation and experienced as mediating his presence. In such a world one can exist as a person over against the Creator. One has space to exist as a finite being, a space created by the epistemic distance from God and protected by one's cognitive freedom, "one's freedom to open or close oneself to the dawning awareness of God which is experienced naturally by a religious animal."

"The christian faith, in the irenaean version of its theology, suggests that this complex process whereby man has been created as a personal being in God's image makes possible his cognitive freedom in relation to his Maker. Thus man's existence as part of the natural order ensures his status as a relatively free being over against the infinite Creator."

It is this epistemic distance which is responsible for the moral ills of existence. The evolution of this life entails certain problems. The life of this being "must have been a constant struggle against a hostile environment, and capable of savage violence against one's fellow human beings, particularly outside one's immediate group; and this being's concepts of the divine were primitive and often blood-thirsty" [One wonders whether here Hick is thinking of the transition exemplified in many of the older traditions represented in the Hebrew Bible]. Similarly, non-moral evil (pain and suffering caused by the "natural world") is explained as "the matrix within which God is gradually creating children for himself out of human animals." The development of human personality and religious and ethical responsibility takes place against the background of a world of exertion, choice, struggle and danger. "In a world devoid both of dangers to be avoided and rewards to be won we may assume that there would have been virtually no development of the human intellect and imagination, and hence of either the sciences or the arts, and hence of human civilization or culture."

At this point, however, one might object that in the notion of the development of civilization and culture Hick is introducing another value which is not covered by his claim that fulfilment is to be had in terms of a loving relationship with God and other humans. For now, person-making entails also the development of the various cultures which have graced the world. It is one thing to argue for the world's being structured to yield some horrific consequences to human activity (e.g., the ecological crisis), but quite another to arguing for the moral usefulness of non-moral conflict. Can one legitimately, for instance, argue that the music of a Mozart, the paintings of a Picasso, the plays of a Shakespeare, the developments in genetics, can justify the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people through the contingencies of erupting volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, forest fires, famine, etc.? Can the wailing voices of parents over the death of a child through one of these 'natural' means be comforted by the claim that at least we can build beautiful buildings? Hick argues that persons should be seen as ends in themselves and not as means, but with the introduction of this cultural element his argument takes a utilitarian turn into precisely viewing the natural dangers, with their all too frequently human fatalities, as means to furthering the creativity of life.

Secondly, in this regard, Hick argue that human beings, and therefore their having to endure suffering, cannot be treated as 'means' toward the fulfilment of some later developing being - for such would devalue those persons who suffer. And yet, Hick implies that the pre-human creation's struggles and pain, and those over millions of years, were precisely 'means' to the human end, the creation of human beings in the 'likeness' of God. Does this means that God does not value any non-human creation apart from its value as a means of human development? Such a thought leave ecological theologians shocked. Moreover, what was the need of the painful and slow evolution of the homo sapien when the important need for a freedom built through the fires of suffering lies in the second and not in the first stage? As David Griffin asks, "why this natural environment had to be created through a long, slow, pain-filled evolutionary process. Hick's God, being essentially omnipotent, could have created the environment in the 'twinkling of an eye'." Griffin correctly continues, "But Hick provides no reason why God should have wasted over four billion years setting the stage for the only thing thought to be intrinsically valuable, the moral and spiritual development of human beings. And the high probability that hundreds of millions of years of that preparation involved unnecessary and unuseful pain counts against Hick's defense of the omnipotent God's total goodness."

Furthermore, if Hick intends to argue that natural calamities have a morally pedagogic function then it is difficult to understand how. How is moral development served by the devastation of an densely inhabited metropolis through an exploding volcano? As McCloskey argues, "Natural calamities do not necessarily turn people to God, but rather present the problem of evil in an acute form; and the problem of evil is said to account for more defections from religion than any other cause."

.... Thus if God's object in bringing about natural calamities is to inspire reverence and awe, He is a bungler. ... Equally important, the use of physical evil to achieve this object is hardly the course one would expect a benevolent God to adopt when other, more effective, less evil methods are available to Him". Similarly, disasters do not necessarily bring communities closer together in mutual sympathy and co-operation.

What is the purpose of this stage, of the epistemic distance? Hick argues that this is only the raw material for the second stage of the creative process, which is the bringing of humanity, thus fashioned as person in the divine image, into the finite likeness of God. "The latter stage represents the fulfilment of the potentialities of our human nature, the completed humanization of man in a society of mutual love ... for the creatures who have been brought into existence in God's image are endowed with a real though limited freedom, and their further growth into the finite divine 'likeness' (similtudo) has to take place through their own free responses within the world in which they find themselves." Thus human existence is teleologically and eschatologically orientated. "The final meaning of man's life lies in the future state to which, in God's purpose, he is moving." "The finite creature is able to come as a (relatively) free person to know and worship God because his embeddedness in nature has initially set him at an epistemic distance from the divine Being."

There is an "autonomous natural order" in which "man is not compelled to be conscious of God", but in which there is to be a free awareness of the divine in faith, and consequent free acknowledgment and worship and therein a rejection of moral evil's selfishness and treating others as means to one's own end. It is this which represents the fulfilment of human development, "the full realization of the human potentialities in a unitary spiritual and moral perfection in the divine kingdom."

Therefore, in this evolutionary approach Hick rejects the notion that humans could have been created morally perfect and yet free, so that they would always would in fact choose rightly. Hick agrees, against the free will defence in theodicy, that "a perfectly good being, although formally free to sin, would in fact never do so", and yet he argues that this is an unacceptable argument in the sense that it undercuts a necessary theodicy. "The answer, I suggest, appeals to the principle that virtues [i.e., moral goodness] which have been formed within the agent as a hard won deposit of his own right decisions in situations of challenge and temptation, are intrinsically more valuable than virtues created within him ready made and without any effort on his part."

Much of this picture receives a jolt when the concept of the necessary correlation between epistemic distance and the anthropological becoming creatures of freely given worship. Rowe, for instance, asks why Hick needs to postulate an original epistemic distance, for he argues that "it as evident that a person could exist in a state of epistemic immediacy with God" while remaining "genuinely free". One would, of course, know God: but this is quite different from developing moral character. The analogy of the child who knows her mother while yet remaining 'free' (not understood in the neutral sense) to develop and deepen, not to mention reject also, is appropriate. Consequently, Hick's rejection of an Augustinian type approach is not as well grounded than might look otherwise.

What Hick is attempting to preserve, it seems, is an understanding of freedom in its strongest terms as something neutral and indeterminate. Certainly, he admits that we are not indeterminate and free in relation to our creation, for "The human does not, in one's own degree of freedom and responsibility, choose one's origin"; that is a given and immutable reality. Nevertheless, one can choose "one's destiny". 'To choose or not to choose', that seems to be Hick's question when discussing theodicy. As shall be argued later, Hick intends to argue something rather different in relation to 'universal salvation', and such - apparently unreconciled approaches to the nature and content of freedom - creates tensions in Hick's thesis.

Has this eschatological progress been made? Hick cuts the cord of verifiability, recognising that the "destructive, self-indulgent exuberance of ... Promethian optimism" has been ruptured and displaced forever by "the depths of demonic malice and cruelty which each generation has experienced, and which we have seen above all in recent history in the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe". According to Hick, humanity does not evolve fully in this life, and therefore Hick admits a necessary tragic component of this-worldly life. Empirically speaking, argues Hick, one may realise that "Within this one life some men advance a long way towards the fulfilment of human potential, most advance a little, but many hardly advance at all and some on the contrary regress." With Erich Fromm, Hick argues that "living is a process of continuous birth. The tragedy in the life of most of us is that we die before we are fully born". [Hick argues that this is not the case with a few figures, e.g., saints, "who have attained to sanctification, or moksha, or nirvana on this earth."]

This tragic interpretation he understands to be the humanistic strategy for interpreting life (DEL 161). For, here, the universe of human suffering will never be justified (in the only morally acceptable sense of this word), and thus humanity's situation as a whole is presented as a tragic scene involving an immensity of unredeemed and unreedemable suffering and of unfulfilled and unfulfillable potentiality. This is a world in which "calamity strikes indiscriminately. There is no justice in the incidence of disease, accident, disaster and tragedy. The righteous as well as the unrighteous are struck down by illness and afflicted by misfortune." Indeed, one should add, this is a world in which the good can often suffer horrendously and injustly whereas the wicked often prosper.

Hick's cites the picture painted by Russell of humanity's "situation is an explicitly pessimistic one". Life on this planet is doomed sooner or later to extinction, and the values which have been developed in the course of it will become extinct with humanity. In some, a like thought has engendered the despairing sense of meaninglessness which Hick discovers as expressed at many points in modern literature.

Hick admits that others have reacted more serenely to the humanist vision, seeing that within this context of cosmic purposelessness the individual's life can nevertheless be purposeful, yielding deep joys and satisfactions, and can thus be acceptable as a whole despite its unavoidable brevity. Humanity may be but an accidental and fleeting phenomenon in the infinite vastness of space and time; but nonetheless, human love, friendship, loyalty and goodness, the endless beauties of the natural world and of human artistic creation, and the achievements of human thought and science, are all self-justifying and their value is not diminished by the humanist understanding of man's ultimate situation. Further, it is possible that before this planet ceases to be inhabitable humanity may succeed in emigrating to another home in the solar system, and may indeed go on for ever finding new worlds on which to live as old ones cease to support him. Thus the race may prove to be immortal, successive generations endlessly arising to enjoy the values of human existence. Such vastly enlarged views of humanity's future, in which the planet earth has long since ceased to play any part, have been made familiar to our imaginations by contemporary science fiction.

Therefore, while there is a general humanistic pessimism as to the possibility of survival, and certainly no room for personal survival or immortality, the psychological outlook of those living does not have to be one of pessimism or despair at the meaninglessness and instability of existence. For example, Hick cites Heidegger's concept of Dasein, as 'being-towards-death' (Sein-zum-Tode), as a way of living authentically under the constant shadow of death without being reduced to angst (DEL 97-100). Sartre summarises Heidegger's teaching: "It is by projecting itself freely towards its final possibility that the Dasein will attain authentic existence and wrench itself away from everyday banality in order to attain the irreplaceable uniqueness of the person". Sartre is cited as an opponent of this conception of Dasein, for, according to him, this is an optimistic idea which forgets that death deprives life of the only kind of meaning that it might conceivably have had. Death is not the completion of a known span, but comes possibly unexpectedly and arbitrarily, and therefore denying life of its completion and consequently also its meaning. Even if death does not unexpectedly intrude to terminate an incomplete life, the knowledge that it may at any moment do so blights our lives with final meaninglessness.

Hick cites a number of others who take an optimistic perspective on the meaninglessness of existence, a tradition which he regards as back throughout the modern period to David Hume. For example, there is what Hick terms "the biological approach", which sees death as a necessary part of the process of evolution. If new members of any species, including humanity, were continually being born without this recruitment being balanced by a continual loss by death, the earth would soon have neither space nor sustenance for them, and the species would exterminate itself through overcrowding. It is thus essential that each generation in its turn be removed to make room for the next. From the beginning of life there has to be a continual succession of new individual members of the species, for it is through the small random differences occurring in each generation that the species has been able both to improve its adaptation to and respond to changes in its environment. Seeing herself, then, as a member of the human species, which she values for the simple but sufficient reason that she is a part of it, a humanist may be able to accept her own future demise with equanimity as a contribution to the on-going life of the race. For "when the individual has contributed adequately to the stream of life the purpose of being an individual has been served".

However, it seems quite arbitrary to argue that the second stage shows no signs of progress, and in fact does not need to, but yet the first stage - that of the evolutionary preparation of intelligent beings of the potentiality for this second stage - does.

- Leaving Behind the Tragic Perspective: Future Worlds of Being

However, the hypothesis of the tragic potentiality of existence will not suffice for Hick. Indeed, "Without ... eschatological fulfilment, this theodicy would collapse." According to Kant, immortality is a postulate of the practical reason, that the union of virtue and happiness in morality cannot be achieved in this world and therefore requires an immortal state. Borrowing heavily from the format, while broadening the content from ethics to human fulfilment (a common element in the religious traditions of both east and west, of which living morally is a substantial part), Hick argues that the totality of human existence is not to be understood in tragic terms, but rather much more optimistically in terms of the eventual - over a number of lives - fulfilment of existence. Hick can argue, with Buddhism, that "such fulfilment is not to be attained in a single earthly life. ... Our earthly life is not enough". He recognises, with the major world religions, "that if the human potential is to be fulfilled in the lives of individual men and women, those lives must be prolonged far beyond the limits of our present bodily existence. The self that is to be perfected must transcend the brief and insecure career of an animal organism. There must, in short, be some form of continued personal life after death."

"[T]he irenaean type of theology sees the divine creation of personal life as taking place through a long and slow process which extends far beyond this earthly scene. ... For the irenaean type of theology rejects the thought that men are at death distributed to an eternal heaven or hell. It thinks instead in terms of continued responsible life in which the soul-making process contributes in other environments beyond this world. Thus it speaks of an intermediate state between this present life and the ultimate heavenly state - the traditional catholic doctrine of purgatory being itself an approach to this idea. Further, in attempting to envisage such an intermediate state, even though necessarily only in very general terms, it postulates many worlds or spheres of existence in addition to this physical world, and envisages the progress of the soul through them towards a final state of perfection in completely fulfilled relationship both to God and to finite beings."

Life is understood to be a pilgrimage, "a soul-making or person-making process", with death forming a comma between one clause and another, or a frontier between one land and another.

Justification of this is not sought in many recurring memories of return, or in parapsychological evidence, although these things do - Hick believes strengthen the case at hand - but morally.

Hick understands the idea of future lives as aiding in "a solution of the theological problem of human suffering." This 'solution' is carefully sculpted so as not to deny the "reality of suffering", but rather to suggest "how it is to be justified or redeemed". Hick recognises the complaint of Ivan Dostoyevsky, that "If all must suffer for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it ...?," the situation which causes Ivan to "hasten to give back my entrance ticket" to heaven. Consequently, his method of justification is not an attempt to suggest the necessity of suffering in a way which would cover the pains of present suffering in utilitarian fashion - "the notions of the 'acceptability' and 'worthwhileness' of someone's suffering are highly ambiguous: acceptable or worthwhile from whose point of view? Surin thinks that Hick is exactly the classic example of the type of 'soul-making' theodicist ... that human suffering constitutes the means by which eternal joy is ultimately attained: suffering is a conditio sine qua non of attaining such joy". And, although there certainly are instances of this type of position in EGL, Hick argues in DEL against the hypothesis that human pains are justified in the eyes of one's Creator because "God wishes to create such beings, to observe their lives and to enter into personal communication with them". However, what Hick here seems to be rejecting is the notion that the struggles and sufferings of individuals are intended to create a fulfilled humanity, which is both future and distinct from the ones involved in the building process - i.e., that one's sufferings are not justified because it produces some other fulfilled person in the future, thus leaving the pains of the one suffering unabated. For as Ivan argues, "Surely I haven't suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when every one suddenly understands what it has all been for."

Following the line of thought developed here, Hick argues that "The acts of savage and sadistic inhumanity which Dostoyevsky describes - which can certainly be matched outside the pages of a novel - can be taken as showing the cruel character of the power which has created a universe in which such things happen. But they can also be taken as showing the tremendous importance which that power attaches to our character as free and responsible moral agents". Hick cannot here be interpreted as suggesting that evil is in any way necessary for the growth and development of fulfilled humanity. Rather, his suggestions have more in common with what has been termed the 'free-will defence'. The point is that God created human beings with a freedom which does not permit coercion - evil is the result of the misuse of that freedom. So Hick argues that "I am not suggesting that it will be seen sub specie aeternitatis that each particular evil experienced by human beings was specifically necessary to the bringing about of this fulfilment." Hence Hick speaks of contingency, the "specific misuses of freedom", and that it is "not necessary that man should move through the exercise of freedom to an eventual full humanization and perfection. But it was necessary that there should be genuine human freedom, carrying with it the possibility of appalling misuses; and all these inhumanities of man to man are part of the contingent form which the story of human freedom has in fact taken."

"Thus the only morally acceptable justification of the agonies and heartaches of human life must be of a ... kind in which the individuals who have suffered themselves participate in the justifying good and are themselves able to see their own past sufferings as having been worthwhile." This 'worthwhileness' is not understood as "compensation in the form of a future happiness enjoyed to balance past misery endured", but rather as "the very different idea of the eventual all-justifying fulfilment of the human potential in a perfected life. There has always been something morally unattractive about the compensatory joys of heaven. It suggests a comparatively low level of ethical insight centred upon the notion of justice as exact reciprocity ..., a certain quantum of pleasure cancelling out a certain quantum of pain. The individual is treated as if he were a creditor in a hedonic bank, whose needs are adequately met by ensuring a mathematical balance. ... but surely the individual would be much more truly valued for his own sake as a living end in himself by a justification of the pains and sorrows through which he has passed in terms of a fulfilment which is a state of his own self and of the human community of selves of which he is a part."

This moral argument for at least a "second chance" of life after death naturally leads Hick to reject the idea of the inalterability of the soul at bodily death. For "it is evident that the varying circumstances of human birth and environment make it much easier for some and much harder for others to come in the course of their lives into a right relationship with God." There are, as one may perceive, inequalities in birth, genetics, social environment, etc.

"The positive side of this is the need for more than this present life if a divine purpose of person-making, through the human being's free responses, is to continue after its completion. For it is evident that the great majority of men and women - perhaps all - come to the end of their present life without having attained to perfect humanity". It follows that the responsible life must continue after bodily death.

Hick argues that "any morally acceptable justification of the sufferings of humanity is bound to postulate a life after death", a life in which there are the possible conditions for one to "undergo further personal growth and development." If it were to be objected that Hick's premise here is faulty, that the idea of moral justification is problematic then Hick would respond by arguing that this fails "under the criterion of universal love".

But it is here, in the understanding of God's love, that Hick has problems. Given the fact that the equation of this with the notion of God is not universally shared, one may conclude that here Hick is leaning rather heavily on his Christian heritage without any explicit rational effort at a support or defence. But why conceive of God as love rather than as anything else? Why should God desire to save everyone? Rejecting an incarnational paradigm has made it more difficult for Hick to justify this, given the diverging plurality of approaches in many of the world's religions. Indeed, when Hick speaks of the "My tentative conclusion ... that in their central witness the great faiths of east and west permit, and by their convergent permission even point towards, a common conception of human destiny", one feels that east and west have been interpreted from the standpoint of a western scholar seeking universal agreement.

To the objection that the need for endless lives is unnecessary for there could be instant perfection at death, Hick responds by arguing that this would lead to a discontinuity of the person: "God would have de-created X and created a new and very different person in his place." Therefore the experience of temporal existence would serve no necessary purpose, for God would be recreating infants as well as those who die in old age.

What about the notion of 'purgatory', however?

Fulfilment Will Come

Moreover, Hick's postulation of universal salvation appears forced. According to Hick, the doctrine of hell is morally intolerable, a theme particular pervasive in western theology particularly since the seventeenth century. It, according to Hick, would entail that "God's good purpose will have been eternally frustrated, leaving the eternal evils both of sin and of punishment." Hick makes an important point when he argues that Jesus' discourse about hell has an existentialist, rather than predictive and descriptive, function. Nevertheless, as with the notion of successive lives, Hick's rejection of the doctrine is made on ethical grounds: "for a conscious creature to undergo physical and mental torture through unending time (if this is indeed conceivable) is horrible and disturbing beyond words; and the thought of such torment being deliberately inflicted by divine decree is totally incompatible with the idea of God as infinite love; the absolute contrast of heaven and hell, entered immediately after death, does not correspond to the innumerable gradations of human good and evil; justice could never demand for finite human sins the infinite penalty of eternal pain; such unending torment could never serve any positive or reformative purpose precisely because it never ends; and it renders any coherent christian theodicy impossible by giving the evils of sin and suffering an eternal lodgement within God's creation."

Hick is certainly not thorough in his explicit summary and consequent rejection of the doctrine of hell, although he does acknowledge - without comment - that "contemporary theologians who do not accept the doctrine of universal salvation usually speak of the finally lost as passing out of existence rather than as endlessly enduring the torments of hell-fire." Nevertheless, Hick's concept of the schematics of justice as repentance, forgiveness and restoration, and of the nature and strength of God's resolve in saving all, rules out any revised concept of eternal damnation or destruction.

He argues that it is far from impossible to reconcile the supposed antimony of divinely universal love and human freedom, and indeed it is obligatory that one rejects the claim that "we are not entitled to make the positive affirmation that all will eventually be saved", and affirm instead "with certainty the future salvation of all".

Hick admits that "if we are to remain free personal creatures it is clear that God cannot coerce us into saving faith, either by a direct force overcoming our wills or even by the hidden operation of the Holy Spirit working in the depths of our unconscious selves. So long as we are free beings standing responsibly before our Maker there must be the possibility of our opposing and refusing him". However, he does not agree that "so long as there is this possibility it cannot be known in advance that all men are indeed going to be saved." Hick does this by questioning the premise upon which the argument rests: "that God can only ensure that all men will eventually be saved if he is prepared if necessary to coerce them, however subtly."

Rather, "the christian doctrine of creation offers an alternative route to the universalist conclusion. For it authorizes us to hold that in creating our human nature God has formed it for himself, so that [as Augustine says] our hearts will be restless until they find rest in him.... In other worlds, God has so made us that the inherent gravitation of our being is towards him. We have here the notion of an inner telos of human nature, a quest of man's whole being for his own proper good ... [, a] divine structuring of human nature, through the forces by which man has been made, for a relationship with God which is the basis of man's own ultimate good. This capacity for God is the image of God within us".

"Thus God does not have to coerce us to respond to him, for he has already so created us that our nature, seeking its own fulfilment and good, leads us to him. The notion of divine coercion is set aside by the fact of divine creation". There is an "openness of human nature towards the reality to which the religions of the world are responses."

Hick has a non-competitive view of the relationship between divine and human freedoms. Consequently, in keeping with the theme of "non-coercive self-disclosures" aiming at personal persuasion, Hick uses the analogy between psychiatrist and patient, whom the former is seeking to free from inner blockages and inhibitions which are confronting her from confronting reality and from being and doing what she really wants to do, in order to describe how the divine persuasion takes place. There is the perfect, unlike those in the human sphere of fallibility, "Divine therapy" of healing and enabling. This enabling is done through the existence of further lives. Hick does not rule out the possibility of even more direct operations of grace, as with psychiatric hospitals' chemical and electrical shock treatments.

"So long as the divine saving activity does not negate or undermine our freedom, so long as we remain responsible beings in relation to God, we can only rejoice that he is so working that we shall eventually attain to the perfecting of our nature in his eternal kingdom."

God, according to Hick, will continue to be at his work until he is done. How many lives shall this process take? Hick does, in the case of saints, believe that there can be an attaining to the final 'heavenly' state. However, this shall not be the case "in most cases". Hick argues that we do not know how many series of worlds is needed - "the number and nature of the individual's successive embodiments will presumably depend upon what is needed for him to reach the point at which he transcends ego-hood and attains the ultimate unitive state, or nirvana".

Critique

What T.F. Torrance says here, of J.A.T. Robinson's In the End God?, applies equally to Hick. As has been indicated above, Hick attempts to combine the all too often juxtaposed elements of human freedom and God's universal saving will together. By defining freedom in relational terms, rather than in strong incompatibalistic/libertarian terms, Hick side-steps some of the problems otherwise associated with a strong claim of universal salvation.

However, has Hick attempted to prove too much? Hick is aware that universal salvation could be affirmed in this strong sense if freedom is understood as excluding the possibility of a 'choice' against God. This, according to Hick, is a denial of freedom as he understands it. In relation to theodicy, in the tradition of 'free-will defences' Hick argues that it is logically impossible for God to make people in such a way that they will be certain to respond freely to himself in love and trust and faith. So how can God guarantee that all will choose him? Hick's conception of the creation of humanity at an epistemic distance from himself sits uneasily alongside the argument that all have an inclination towards God.

Griffin argues that for Hick "the future life or lives will not differ quantstively from this one in terms of the relation between God and the soul; it will only differ quantitively, i.e., it will be much longer. but this raises the question as to why God did not simply make our earthly life-spans much longer, so that we could reach the goal on earth, or at least get much closer to it. this would have been very easy for an omnipotent God and would have made Hick's theodicy a little more plausible."

Hick's argument as to the freedom of humanity for God forgets the one significant factor of the irrationality of sin in its ego-centricity. Hick explicitly rejects any Augustinian conception of the thought of being is turned in upon oneself that one can reject grace. But is his position any more coherent? Moreover, in relation to the model of the love of God cited, Mackintosh's earlier comment appears to retain its force - universalism, according to Mackintosh, "has too much operated with a divine love which is in reality a thing, a nature force comparable to a magnetic attraction, and advancing to its goal with overwhelming and pervisible certainty." But can Hick logically retain the belief that "God will eventually succeed in the purpose of winning all men to himself in faith and love", when he attempts to operate with a personal and relational model of divine love (persuading, coaxing, etc.) while regarding the space for human choices of the absurd to be a reality?

In place of the doctrine of hell Hick offers us a reformed doctrine of purgatory. What this means is that the unrepentant sinner in this life goes on getting more and more chances to repent after death until he eventually sees the point. Leaving aside the question of whether this bears much relation to the traditional account of purgatory, according to which it is believed that the fundamental choice of good and evil is made in this life, and that purgatory is a matter of cleaning up defects and turning to the highest pitch a character which is basically orientated toward the good, we may wonder whether Hick is offering us an intelligible account of responsibility and habit. What Hick is saying is that however evil we choose to behave in this life, we cannot be wholly corrupted. No evil habit can become so much a part of our character than we can be morally destroyed. What seems to be lurking in the background here is a kind of Plotinian doctrine that 'the whole soul does not descend', that there is something about human beings which transcends their own choices. Obviously Hick is reacting predestinarians who believe that the doctrine of the Fall means that our original nature was totally destroyed and has to be totally remade by God, but in seeking to defend man's possibility of leading a good life he goes to the opposite extreme of asserting that this possibility is a practical certainty. So over against Hick's thesis of inevitable sin we now have inevitable salvation. Altogether the dignity of man as more than a cosmic puppet can hardly be said to be safeguarded.

If "God ordained a world ... within which his creatures will have come as perfected persons to love and serve him, through a process in which their own free insight and response have been an essential element", then it would take special pleading to theoretically rule out any possibility of rejection. Given that people refuse God in this life even when faced with his grace, there is no necessary condition which would lead one to argue that all can therefore be saved.

Is his optimism in the future firmly enough secured in order to permanently keep the hungry wolves from the door? Hick's thought is founded on the same intentional fallacy as those encountered earlier - that one can predict the future. Hick builds not on the notion of biblical, or any other source of, revelation of the future, but rather uses a combination of many emphases. The debate would then become that over whether one believed Hick's picture or that of the supposed source of divine revelation.

Consequently, "The religions, on the other hand, say that our human situation is not ultimately tragic because it is leading to a universal fulfilment of such worth that in relation to it all human suffering will be rendered manifestly worthwhile." Interestingly, Hick approves of that which Steiner complains of, that "Christian faith asserts that our life has its meaning within the great Divina Commedia of the creation of the perfected finite spiritual life, and that it is good not only because of the present elements of happiness and joy within it but also because it is in process towards a universal fulfilment of limitless value .... Christian faith is a final optimism because it sees the human story in its relation to God - God who ... is agape, love."

The problem of easy talk becomes more acute when it is remembered that Hick, even at this stage, rejects a christological paradigm. Rather, he analyses and combines the various insights that are presented from parapsychology and eastern religions as well as from the Christian tradition (or, a Christian tradition reminiscent of some post-Enlightenment endeavours). If one were to recall Hick's image of the king, the blind men and the elephant, one could say that Hick stands in the place of the king, able to perceive of what the blind men were only groping around after, and therefore only partially conceiving. Hick's is a 'designer' religion which reflects contemporary market-society politics, and yet this is combined with a totalitarian modernism of the liberal imperialistic age. With Surin, one could argue that Hick's is "a logic which irons out the heterogeneous precisely by subsuming it under the categories of comprehensive and totalizing global and world theologies." Here we have a closure, the arrival at the one universal truth and the negation of all other possibilities.

Is Hick in danger of subsuming all that is complex and too untidy to fit a neat synthesis and categorisation into precisely a for of over-arching, over-simple (and indeed, over-simplistic) thesis? As such it is a coercive pluralism, doing exactly what he is reacting against in the Christian tradition's use of the exclusivistic perspective. To use the language of Donovan, Hick, and the like, have "been too ready to suggest what must be the truth of the matter, and have attempted to manufacture agreement on that truth by carrying out radical surgery on the traditions".

Consequently, Roth argues that "Hick's theodicy is too good to be true". Evil's being overcome, our evolving into fulfilled creatures, and our eschatological perceiving of suffering's divinely justifiable purpose all strikes Roth as "pie in the sky by and by - a whole one, not just a slice. This theodicy is nice."

However, Roth argues, "Some hardship and pain may make persons stronger and better, but Hick, I think, sees the world too much as a shoolroom when it is actually more like a dangerous alley. ... In the Holocaust persons were ruined and destroyed more than they were made or perfected. Auschwitz is waste, the very antithesis of providential design and purpose in God's economy." "John Hick finds it noce enough to justify calling God's love and goodness limitless. The sheer amount and intensity of evil's waste make me demur." Roth argues, therefore, that "a wiser course ... [is] to admit that some facts cannot be reconciled with God's limitless goodness and love."

Hick's trans-Christian eclecticism has been well documented, and there are distinct leanings within DEL towards this later method. However, in DEL he remains professedly within the context of western Christianity; and it is this which provides the link with the Christian eschatological reflections of this chapter. Hick's own particular 'western Christian' eclecticism in DEL constitutes, for instance, a fusion of elements from a Leibnizian approach to teleological development with a Kantian ethical approach to immortality, which postulates that this achieving of the goal is postponed until 'another' or 'next' life, all coming to focus in what Hick terms the 'Irenaean' approach to existence. Hick's reflections on this 'next life's' means of progress becomes more influenced by eastern teachings on reincarnation and Origenism than with Christian conceptions of purgatory, and - rather amazingly, and with very little effort - the eastern concepts of God and nirvana come to look very like the Christian concepts of God and 'heaven', respectively.

Hick does not intend to stray too far into the grounds of unwarranted speculation, for fear of comfortably promoting one's self-desires into the future. Hence Hick tentatively expresses what a possible eschatology, as opposed to pareschatology, might look like. And yet, it must be admitted, in attempting to spell out his belief in the pareschatology Hick appears to know rather a lot. The methodological eschatological agnosticism has not filtered adequately through into his pareschatology.

Much of Hick's pareschatology would appear to need to be revised in the light of his more recent development, what Gillis has claimed to be "a quite new position". In An Interpretation of Religion Hick has replaced his rather Christian sounding God by 'Ultimate Reality', a Reality beyond knowing.

Hick does introduce a note of agnosticism and an appreciation of the problems associated with theological speech, especially that which attempts to encompass all the world's religions. Hick not only suggests that the eschaton may be beyond the anticipations of any of our "earthly religious traditions" (including his own pluralism!) and possibly "beyond the range of our imaginations", "the inexperienceable and indescribable ground of the range of human religious experience in so far as this is more than purely human projection", but also that it is theoretically possible at least that perhaps one may have been correct all along. As James Kellenberger argues, "Hick does not claim to know now".

Even in 1981 Hick was able to claim that "A theologian is not obliged to know the answer to every question. There is a place for trust in the goodness of God beyond our understanding. ... [S]uch a theodicy does not expect to be able to see in detail how 'all things work together for good' for God's creatures, or how it can be that by wrestling with evil we are ultimately being created through it." However, one seriously wonders whether this agnosticism has played a prominent enough part in Hicks' eschatological speculations and therefore whether this claim to agnosticism functions more as a deflection of serious criticism. Has Hick not already seen too much? Or rather, given the ease of his reflections, has he not seen enough? If he had, then perhaps his discourse would be embued with a more tentative character.

What does the 'transcendental agnosticism' do to Hick's pareschatology? It would appear necessary for Hick to abandon thoughts of humanity coming to fulfilment in relation to the God of love who will save all - after all, not knowing who or what the Real is, its status toward us, etc., would seem to entail this eschatological agnosticism. And yet Hick still wants to retain the notion of the religions as responses to the Real which inadequately, albeit really, capture various aspects of the truth of this Real. So he argues that this process moves towards "a limitlessly good fulfilment of the human project of human existence". He still affirms that "all shall be well". Ernst criticises Hick's continued "rationalist presuppositions".

"It is, alas, part of the very nature of freedom to have the power not to do what one has a very good reason to do. So, while I fully agree with Hick that epistemic distance from God is necessary to cognitive freedom in relation to God, I can find no good reasons in Hick's writings to support his further claims that epistemic distance from God is necessary for the very existence of human persons, for their being free to develop morally, and for their being free with respect to coming to love God. And, if I am right about this, one must wonder about what good is served by our state of epistemic distance from God."

Consequently, it may be argued that Hick finds it all too easy to justify evil and suffering, and his talk resembles the chattering that is all too often a problem for those who should be silent in the face of the horror of catastrophe. This particular problem is one which the concept of theodicy is alleged to have generally. This is because suffering and evil are justifiable for Hick, relativising it in the process. Even the appearance of an excessive amount of suffering does not pose too much of a problem for Hick, for he argues that "our judgments of intensity are relative. We might identify some form of natural evil as the worst that there is - say the agony that can be caused by death from cancer - and claim that a loving God would not have allowed this to exist. but in a world in which there was no cancer, something else would then rank as the worst form of natural evil. If we eliminate this, something else; and so on. And the process would continue until the world was free of all natural evil. ... There could not be a person-making world devoid of what we call evil; and evils are never tolerable - except for the sake of the greater good."

Hick, therefore argues that we cannot know what would be an 'excess' of suffering from our limited perspective, and consequently have to agree that what we have is for 'the best'. Simply stated, proportionate 'punishment' or suffering, according to Hick, cannot serve a person-making function. "For it would be evident that wrong deeds bring disaster upon the agent whilst good deeds bring health and prosperity; and in such a world a truly moral action, action done because it is right, would be impossible." "In other words, the very mystery of evil, the very fact that disasters afflict human beings in contingent, undirected and haphazard ways, is itself a necessary feature of a world that calls forth mutual aid and builds up mutual caring and love." Therefore, "even amidst the tragic calamity and suffering we are still within the sphere of his love and are moving towards his kingdom."

However, does this argument for preventing the arguing into infinity (i.e., that we would continue to argue until all soul-making suffering was dispelled) coherent? Exactly the question posed by critics is why God could not have created a less hostile world in order to permit human development. Moreover, Hick's argument, Davis argues, "appears to cut the other way too: it seems to imply that human suffering could get infinitely worse than it is now and still be compatible with the existence of a perfectly good and omnipotent God." Hick negates any questioning, of either the goodness of God or of the worthwhileness of one's present sufferings, by negating the possibility of such forms of questions by continually referring to the fact that God is good and omnipotent, and therefore the sufferings are all for our own personality development's benefit.

A further consequence, according to Roth, "is that Hick must defend evil, and he cannot do so without condioning - even if only inadvertently or unintentionally - what happened to its victims." Roth argues that all Hick's "excuses, I fear, defend evil too much".

However, as MacKinnon argues:

Futurist eschatologies often thrive on an optimistic 'short-term memory' - particularly in the context of evolutionary eschatologies - with little recollection of the tragedy and failures of the past (see later), contrasting absolutely the particularities of Good Friday with its overwhelming by Easter Sunday. And where the presence of evil does receive play the pain of the present is to some degree generally 'trivialised', the tragic significance of the concrete sufferings of Good Friday being understood as a means to an end, i.e., Easter Sunday and the Sabbath rest in the liberating feast of joy.